Day 3 – Opening And Closing Doors

We looked yesterday at how to charge up your spiritual resources to increase your power.

One of the important actions we saw was conditioning the soul using words.

Reasons For Conditioning The Soul

1. To allow the power from your spirit to flow out unhindered

2. To act as a shield of protection from outside attack

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Audio File

Text Transcript

Today is Wednesday and day three of our week of blessing. Today I want to look at opening and closing doors. Now we looked yesterday at how to charge up your spiritual resources and to increase your power and one of the important actions we saw was that you need to condition your soul. Using words.

Two Reasons to Condition The Soul

Now, why do we need to condition our soul? Well, there’s two main reasons. Firstly, so that we can allow the power from within our spirit to flow out unhindered. And secondly, to act as a shield of protection from outside attack. Now there are two essential mantles that get activated when we do this. And they are two very powerful mantles, which when activated, they cause the spirit and the soul to work together In harmony.

Now I explained this in some detail in my newest book, the Essential Mantles of Anointing. If you have not read that book yet, I highly recommend you get your hands on it. Or in the case of the ebook that you get it on your device. And that you read it because I cover quite a range of concepts of the spiritual life of how to relate to God, in his fullness and to develop and use the main mantles.

The essential mantles are what we need not only to live a good spiritual life but also to function effectively in ministry. Go and get them now. You won’t regret it.

Now, the mantle of power enables us to tap into the power that is within and highly amplify and magnify it.

The mantle of protection provides a shield of attack from the outside. So there are, in effect, two different doors in you that need to be opened or closed as the case may be. The one must provide an opening for the power of the spirit from coming from within your own spirit to flow outwards. We call this the mantle of power. And we learned in a bit of detail yesterday how you can activate that mantle of power.

The other must block outside forces from entering. It’s like the armor Paul describes in Ephesians chapter six, and we call this the mantle of protection.

Open The Doors For Power

I explain both of these in some detail in my book. I don’t have time to do it all now. Okay, there are doors that we must shut as well as doors that we must open. Now, we looked at yesterday at the mantle of power and we need to open the doors Through speaking the scriptures and speaking in tongues and we gave that procedure where you condition the soul to open the doors for that power to flow outwards from your spirit through your soul and into the rest of your life.

Three Doors To Shut

But there are doors that we must shut. There are three main doors, in fact, that we must shut. You see, they are the roots of a tree that grows, and the Bible calls this tree, the flesh. The inherent sinful nature, which has been in us since Adam and Eve partook of the fruit in the Garden of Eden, and still remains within us.

Now, that tree produces all kinds of sinful behavior. Satan tries to open these doors. as much as he can, because he knows that the flesh is against the spirit and will block the flow of the anointing of God coming out of your spirits. So Satan uses various different weapons, and I’ve dealt with this in detail, but three main weapons he uses firstly is your own sinful weakness known as the flesh.

Then, he puts thoughts into your mind to create pictures and motivate sinful behavior. He then uses the people around you, who are mostly under his control because they’re unbelievers. This is what the scripture calls the world system. Now, the main target in all of these is your mind.

The Mind Is Your Battleground

You see, if your mind is filled with the wrong thoughts, it encourages the flesh. Now we are surrounded by worldly influences all around us and they are very attractive. They get our attention all the time. Here’s a common scenario which you might be able to identify and in our modern day of Internet connection and social media.

This is what happens. You switch on your phone to check your email and you need to do this because there may be something important that’s coming in. But inevitably in those emails will be advertisements with links to websites, which will give you further information about the thing that they’re trying to attract your attention.

Time Spent In Social Media

And very often it’ll get your attention. You say, Oh, that, that looks interesting. Let’s click on that and have a look. And from there, it’s going to take you to various different websites. And the most common of these are what are known as the social media. And that’s going to be Facebook., and YouTube and, a very popular modern one, Tik Tok.

Before you know it, you’re browsing these websites and you’re viewing the things that attract your attention. So you end up going to a Facebook page and immediately you are given a list of a whole lot of other posts that people have made on Facebook and some of them can be quite interesting.

So you find, After you’ve looked at the first one, you’ll scroll down to the next one and you’ll scroll down until you see something that may interest you and you may click on that. And before you know it, you’ve gone through a whole lot of different Facebook pages, which hopefully if your contacts and friends on Facebook are all Christians, they would all have published something edifying and uplifting, but that’s not the case, is it?

You’re going to find all sorts of junk. There on those Facebook pages, you’re going to see pictures that are going to fill your mind with things that stir the flesh. And what are the three roots of the flesh? They are bitterness and anger, sexual desire and lust, and they are desire for fortune and fame, temporal values.

Picture That Enter Your Mind

And so you end up going page to page and the pictures go straight into your mind. Sooner or later, you’re going to see A page that gives you a few TikTok videos that you could view. And it’ll just have the one frame and you say, Oh, that looks interesting. I wonder what that’s about. And you’ll click on that little TikTok and it’ll only run for a few minutes.

And you see, you say, well let’s see what’s next, let’s see what’s next, and you end up scrolling one to another, sometimes you get one that’s funny and makes you laugh, then you’ll get another one that may interest you, you may even get something from a Christian. But nine times out of ten, You’re going to see bitterness, anger, lust, desire for things.

The flesh is going to be stirred up, and those pictures are going to go straight into your mind. And you know what? You can’t unsee something. After you’ve seen it, that’s the power of pictures. The moment they go into your mind, you can recall that visually almost instantly. Now, a lot of what you look at may be innocent, but those pictures stick in your mind.

And, you know, They’re easier to remember than words. So when you read the scriptures, you’re reading a lot of words, and you may have read quite a lot of scripture, and by the time you finish, you can’t even remember what you read, because words don’t penetrate your mind, unless they are converted into pictures.

No Time Left For Spiritual Things

Your mind is filled now with all of these pictures and now your time is gone. And you think, well, I really need to get into the word. I should spend a bit of time in prayer. But you know, my time’s gone now. I look at the time. I didn’t realize how long I’d spent there browsing through Facebook and TikTok.

And it’s a bit late now. I will get into the word later. I will make time to pray later. In any case, the pictures are bubbling in your mind and the scriptures are just Words. They don’t have the same appeal. You don’t realize that you’ve built another kind of mantle. I call this a bad mantle.

A Bad Mantle Is Blocking You

And this mantle has been designed by the enemy to cover over that mantle of power that you activated, as we learned yesterday, so that none of that power can get out! What you’ve done is you’ve given closed doors to the power of God, and God can no longer work with you.

And now all those things that you desired, that you wanted to reach out for, that you want God’s power to go out to, to bring you, whether it be healing in your body, financial blessing, or relationships, all that power is blocked.

And all that you can see in your mind is the negative and the negative is going to depress you and discourage you and make you just want to give up and wonder why you should bother being a Christian. And all it took was a little bit of feeding in impressions from The world. It is so subtle. It is so quick and easy for it to happen to you.

Watch Out For The News

And you’re going to have to make up your mind and discipline yourself that the moment you start that scrolling, you should say, hang on, let me shut it out. It’s the same with browsing the latest news. It’s good to know what’s going on in the world, but news is never designed to uplift. It’s always designed to discourage and to put fear in you.

Everything’s going wrong in your own country, in your community. You look in the world and the world has gone crazy. Wars everywhere and everybody killing and fighting one another. You think what kind of life is this? Can I bring up children in a world like this? What does the future hold? You are so preoccupied with the pictures that Satan has put in that the positive power within you can’t flow out.

So start making it a practice now as from today that you start shutting out some of those negative things. I’m not saying don’t go there. I’m just saying look at only what is of interest, then stop. Resist the temptation to scroll and look further. Rather stop it right there, go and spend a bit of time getting into the word.

How To Get Into The Word And Prayer

And I will give you a bit of a program that you can use for that. Perhaps we will look at that tomorrow, but for now, remember. Decide what you want from God, build up those resources within, and then close those doors to the enemy and open wide the doors that are going to allow the blessing of the Lord to flow out through you and to accomplish the things you desire.